I just made myself a breakfast taco (for dinner). It consisted of:
fresh wilted spinach
goat cheese
one egg, over easy
salsa
one whole-wheat tortilla
A rather dressed-up doodley-doo version of a breakfast taco, based on local standards. It was delicious, though.
I just ordered a Timbuk2 Custom Laptop Messenger Bag. Or rather, Bob did, since it is my overdoodly-due Xmas/Valentines/early berfday gift. And then I remembered: I won't be able to carry it for six months after surgery. How am I going to transport my possessions post-op?
Let me describe to you what I am going through with this surgery thing.
Imagine that you feel normal. Only your version of normal isn't normal at all. You have a major chest wall deformity. You've had it your whole life and never thought much of it, except as a cosmetic inconvenience. Your doctors avoided/ignored it up until about four years ago, when you started getting bronchitis all the time. And phantom chest pains. And heart palpitations. You added two and two together and figured out that it was the pectus excavatum that was to blame. Tests confirm that the thing is giving your heart and lungs trouble. They are squished and unhappy about it. That is why you have never been able to run or do sports, why you gasp and choke for air when you ascend a hill on foot, and why you can feel your heart beating in your armpit.
Still, this is your version of normal. You do everything you want to do in this life, except wear hotsy-totsy low tops.
You are thirty. Here are your options:
1) Have surgery. Surgery involves general anesthesia, a six-inch incision cut just below your breasts. The doctor will cut through the muscle wall to expose your offending sternum and costal cartilage. He will then break the cartilege that connects the sternum to the ribs and use wires and a bar to reconnect them. It takes about six months for the cartilage to grow back. In that time, you really can't do anything except sit around and wait for it to grow back. And the first two to four weeks, you will be in a lot of pain! After about six months, though, you'll be mostly normal, except for a scar. Complications include pneumothorax, fluid in the lungs, collapsed lung, accidental nicking of heart tissue, blood loss, and death. You will spend an entire season of your life stuck in a chair doped up on pain meds.
2) Not have surgery. Risk an aortic dissection or similar operable heart issue in your 40s and 50s. Continue to have heart palps and chronic bronchitis. Maybe they will get worse, maybe they will not. Not wear hotsy-totsy tops. Expect to die in your 50s or 60s.
Surgery involves choosing one of the twenty or so guys who does this surgery and figuring out which surgery you'll have. There are two types: Ravitch and Nuss. I've described Ravitch above. Nuss is used primarily on teens and children and involves making two small incisions on the sides and threading a thick metal bar underneath the sternum, turning the bar over and popping the sternum into place, based on the theory that the costal cartilage is soft enough to simply be bent. Adults who have had this surgery complain of long-term pain and soreness while the bar is in, usually for two-three years. I'm not sure this is the surgery for me. I'm very severe and from a physics standpoint, this seems ridiculous.
I will also have to travel to either Houston or Baltimore to have it done. I think I prefer Houston but the Baltimore surgeon has more of a reputation for this surgery.
It's an emotionally difficult thing, this surgery.
Ouch!
Mazel tov to Pgraph for the most fun hobo improv show ever. I laughed my ass off, esp. at Kaci wielding a spoon. Great show, guys!
Posted by Zerd at February 15, 2007 11:26 PM